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IN MY OPINION

Petty still true blue at 71

50 years after driving career began

DAVID POOLE

The Charlotte Observer

Sunday, Jul. 13, 2008

Weathered like a favorite leather jacket, crinkled with lines of experience but resilient to the ravages of age, Richard Petty still stands tall.

His face is stock-car's Rushmore. His wrap-around sunglasses and custom-made cowboy hat – resplendent with feathered accoutrement – are iconic.

He is a living, breathing trademark.

He is a walking, talking history book.

At 71 years old, “The King” is a fully realized legend.

Petty won 200 Cup races, a number so far beyond logic it almost loses value, and racked up seven championships. The second-generation racer from tiny Level Cross stood for a sporting epoch as the name and the face of his sport, the way Muhammad Ali did for boxing and Arnold Palmer for golf.

It had to start somewhere.

For Petty, the beginning came 50 years ago Saturday on a half-mile dirt track in Columbia, where generations of the Southeast's finest cut their racing teeth.

Three years earlier Richard had asked his father, stock-car pioneer Lee Petty, about driving.

“I'd already done everything there was to do except drive,” Richard says. “I'd built cars, I had worked on them, I had painted them and I had worked in the pits.”

He had even attended the first Strictly Stock series race – Cup's forerunner – in Charlotte in 1949, having to thumb a ride home after Lee wrecked the car they'd rode in.

Lee told his 18-year-old son they'd talk about driving when Richard turned 21.

“And if you knew my daddy,” Richard says, “you knew that was the end of it.”

Richard waited until his 21st birthday – July 2, 1958 – and brought it up again.

“Daddy said, ‘There's a car, you get it ready and you can race in Columbia,'” he says.

The Grand National Series ran that night at McCormick Field in Asheville. Lee took the family's No.42 Oldsmobile there and won $265, finishing fourth.

NASCAR's convertible series was running at Columbia.

“Daddy just sent me off on my own, basically,” Richard remembers. Dale Inman, who would go on to a career as one of the greatest mechanics racing would know, went too as Richard's crew chief. “If you look at it now in the scheme of racing, it was just Saturday night racing. But to us it was major league.”

Petty finished sixth, five laps down to winner Bob Welborn, but brought the car home in one piece along with $200.

Richard's clearest memory of that night is the ride home.

“We were in the pickup truck, me and Dale and one other fellow. I told them, ‘You know, I think I am going to like this driving thing,'” Richard says, smiling at his understatement.

His first Grand National start came six days later, at Canadian Exposition Stadium in Toronto, finishing 17th of 19 in a race Lee won. In 1992, after 1,184 races in NASCAR's top series, Petty retired.

“The winning?” Petty says of what came in between. “No, that never got old.”

Not even in 1967, when he won 10 straight on the way to 27 victories in 49 races.

“Plymouth took us to New York and that was the first time I'd ever been in New York for the press,” Petty says. “That was one of the first times that we were exposed to the rest of the world. We were a Southern sport. Every once in a while we'd get lucky and get our name in the paper in Osk Kosh or something like that. But once we started winning all of those races people started covering it.

“I have a clipping some guy sent us from a paper in Canada and all it says is “Petty runs second.” It doesn't tell who won or anything else. It got to that point.”

Petty remembers those days with another type of fondness.

“In 1967 we had eight people working for us,” Petty says. “That was it. They went to all the races. … I was there every day, working on the car. … Those were the real satisfying years because I was involved in the whole program. I owned the car and paid the bills and you did it all.”

Earlier this year the Petty family sold a majority stake in the team to Boston Ventures, an investment group with the kind of dollars needed to compete in today's NASCAR world. That pushed “The King” another level away.

But no matter what it might say on the deed to Petty Enterprises, Petty's mark on his sport is indelible. He not only helped define it competitively, he laid the framework for how it deals with the people who love it. While the fan's accessibility to NASCAR's stars has eroded, Petty rightfully is cited as the man who set the standard for that to start with.

“We never got a dollar from a race track or from a sponsor,” Petty says. “Every dollar I ever got came from the fans. They're the reason Richard Petty exists. Their money came through the tracks, but without the fans there are no race tracks. They're the reason we had sponsors.”

It was Petty's farewell tour in 1992 that expanded the sport's merchandising horizons.

“I wasn't trying to lead anybody. … We just thought it would be a better deal for us and our people so we could get better cars and win more races. We were just riding the horse through the pasture along with everybody else, but we were leading the crowd without knowing it.

“The good Lord put me in the right place in the right circumstances at the right time. I got stuck here at the right time to ride that horse through the field.”

And, after 50 years in the saddle, he still rides tall.

Audience with 'The King'

Richard Petty competed head-to-head with many of his fellow all-time NASCAR legends. Here is how Petty fared one-on-one against some of them (head-to-head wins means which driver finished ahead of the other in races where they both competed):

Petty vs. David Pearson (550 races)

Driver	Head-to-head wins	Races won	Top fives	Top 10s	Avg. finish
Richard Petty	289	107	291	366	9.8
David Pearson	261	97	289	349	11.2

Petty vs. Bobby Allison (693 races)

Driver	Head-to-head wins	Races won	Top fives	Top 10s	Avg. finish
Richard Petty	385	134	351	455	10.4
Bobby Allison	308	83	329	436	11.3

Petty vs. Cale Yarborough (518 races)

Driver	Head-to-head wins	Races won	Top fives	Top 10s	Avg. finish
Richard Petty	272	75	254	323	11.4
Cale Yarborough	246	82	243	300	12.4

Petty vs. Darrell Waltrip (562 races)

Driver	Head-to-head wins	Races won	Top fives	Top 10s	Avg. finish
Richard Petty	216	45	182	270	14.7
Darrell Waltrip	346	83	260	347	11.6

Petty vs. Dale Earnhardt (415 races)

Driver	Head-to-head wins	Races won	Top fives	Top 10s	Avg. finish
Richard Petty	141	15	90	160	17.1
Dale Earnhardt	274	52	178	266	11.3

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